Producing a genuine fruit chocolate has been a matter of great concern in the field of confections. However, addition of a fresh fruit, which is a very watery material to chocolate has been proved to be impracticable since the two components hardly combine with each other. In such products prepared prior to the present invention only a very limited amount of fresh fruit is incorporated in chocolate. However the resulting "fruit chocolate" lacked the taste and odor of the incorporated fruit. Therefore, fruity flavorings have generally been utilized to produce fruit-flavored chocolates. The products containing such flavorings have the odor of a fruit but lack the requisite taste of the fruit.
Naturally it has been conceived to combine dried fruit or candied fruit with chocolate, thereby increasing the fruit-to-chocolate proportion to a level sufficient to provide the product with a fruit taste. Examples of conventional chocolate products based on this concept are chocolate-coated dry fruits and a class of fruit chocolates produced by molding a chocolate paste which contains grains or crushed pieces of a dried fruit dispersed therein. In these chocolate products, however, the presence of the grains or crushed pieces of dry fruit is perceptible as a feeling of physical variance with the smoothness of chocolate itself on the tongue. Due to this disadvantageous texture, products of this type have not been commercially successful.
It is desirable therefore, to overcome the aforementioned problem that a dehydrated fruit be uniformly mixed with or dispersed in a chocolate base. Hitherto, however, this has been very difficult to accomplish for the following reasons.
Dried fruits and candied fruits are of course lower in water content than fresh or raw fruits, but they still contain considerably large amounts of water in comparison with chocolate. In addition, they contain saccharides, polysaccharides and pectic substances which make them sticky. Therefore, when a dehydrated fruit or crushed pieces thereof are added to chocolate base at the stage of adding other ingredients during a conventional sweet chocolate manufacturing process, the resulting mixture is difficult to blend into a dough-like consistency. Even in the event a dough-like state can be produced, further refining of the dough-like mixture by roll refiners causes the dehydrated fruit to be squeezed, resulting in the formation of a sticky jelly-like phase. With the formation of the jelly-like phase other ingredients such as powdered milk, form sticky agglomerates which are very difficult to reduce in size. This causes further refining to be virtually impossible. Even if refining can be achieved by greatly decreasing the proportion of dehydrated fruit to chocolate, there is a further problem that the succeeding conching process becomes impracticable. During conching, the pieces of dehydrated fruit in the chocolate paste adhere to one another, incorporate hydrophilic materials such as sugar and powdered mild and/or absorb moisture, with the result that grains or coarse particles are formed in the paste. If the conching process is further continued, these grains or coarse particles agglomerate into larger masses, which tend to separate from the fat in the paste and solidify in the conching apparatus, which can damage the apparatus.
Another attempt to solve the problem of how to effectively incorporate fruit into a chocolate confectionary involved initially pulverizing dehydrated fruit and mixing it with the chocolate base in such small particles that the resulting fruit chocolate may not offer a feeling of physical variance on the tongue. However, such pulverization of any dehydrated fruit is virtually impossible by means of a conventional mill because of sticking of crushed pieces of the fruit to mill parts such as blades. Even if the pulverization is forcibly accomplished, the result is the formation of agglomerates of a sticky paste-like or jelly-like substance which cannot be uniformly dispersed in a chocolate paste.
It is known that a material which exhibits stickiness at room temperature may be pulverized in frozen state. Dehydrated fruits can be pulverized by this technique, but the pulverized fruits remain in the form of small particles only while they are in the frozen state. As the temperature of the particles rises to room temperature or above, the particles soften and begin to adhere to one another finally turning into sticky or jelly-like agglomerates of considerably large size. Therefore, it has been impossible to disperse a dehydrated or freeze-pulverized dehydrated fruit in a chocolate paste in finely pulverized form.